with his helmet-crest, in the
shape of a horse's head, thrown back from his shoulders, may suggest to
him on review of these passages of history: one thought only I must
guard him against, strictly; namely, that a condottiere's religion must
necessarily have been false or hypocritical. The folly of nations is in
nothing more manifest than in their placid reconciliation of noble
creeds with base practices. But the reconciliation, in the fourteenth as
in the nineteenth century, was usually foolish only, not insincere.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 9: Published by the Arundel Society (1872), together with a
chromo-lithograph after a drawing by Herr Gnauth.--ED.]

[Footnote 10:

D.M.
Gerardo Bolderio
sui temporis
Physicorum Principi
Franciscus et
Matthaeus Nepotes
P.P.]

[Footnote 11: I am indebted for this genealogy to the research and to
the courtesy of Mr. J. Stefani. The help given me by other Venetian
friends, especially Mr. Rawdon Brown, dates from many years back in
matters of this kind.]

VERONA AND ITS RIVERS.[12]

231. The discourse began with a description of the scenery of the
eastern approach to Verona, with special remarks upon its magnificent
fortifications, consisting of a steep ditch, some thirty feet deep by
sixty or eighty wide, cut out of the solid rock, and the precipice-like
wall above, with towers crested with forked battlements set along it at
due intervals. The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing
"fossil creatures still so like the creatures they were once, that there
it first occurred to the human brain to imagine that the buried shapes
were not mockeries of life, but had indeed once lived; and, under those
white banks by the roadside, was born, like a poor Italian gypsy, the
modern science of geology." ... "The wall was chiefly built, the moat
entirely excavated, by Can Grande della Scala; and it represents
typically the form, of defense which rendered it possible for the life
and the arts of citizens to be preserved and practiced in an age of
habitual war. Not only so, but it is the wall of the actual city which
headed the great Lombard league, which was the beginner of personal and
independent power in the Italian nation, and the first banner-bearer,
therefore, of all that has been vitally independent in religion and in
art throughout the entire Christian world to this day." At the upper
angle of the wall, looking down the northern descent, is seen a